Were We Right or Were We Right?: Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke

Publishers Weekly -- Publishers Weekly, 3/28/2008 11:00:00 AM

Novelist Nicholson Baker’s latest nonfiction foray (he took on library deacquistion in Double Fold) takes aim at nothing less than allied behavior during WWII, specifically the allied use of violence on civilians in wartime (and nominal peacetime). All reviews comment on Baker’s method of presenting documentary sound bites lifted from historical documents and ephemera, but come to different conclusions about the technique’s meaning and effectiveness.

Colm Tóibín, writing in the Sunday New York Times Book Review, calls the book “riveting and fascinating…. an eloquent and passionate assault on the idea that the deliberate targeting of civilians can ever be justified.”

In a New York Times review published almost two weeks prior to Tóibín’s, William Grimes says of the book, “[m]uddled and often infuriating, [it] sounds its single, solemn note incessantly, like a mallet striking a kettle drum over and over…. [a] self-important, hand-wringing, moral mess of a book.”

In Time, Lev Grossman praises the “loupe-eyed precision” that makes each of Baker's entries “a Goya etching in prose,” but he calls Baker’s cut-and-paste documentary method “maddeningly slippery,” making it “hard to argue with somebody who won't argue.”

Writing in the L.A. Times, Cod author Mark Kurlansky finds it a “meticulously researched and well-constructed book demonstrating that World War II was one of the biggest, most carefully plotted lies in modern history.” His final graf says that it “may be one of the most important books you will ever read.”

A measured review from Sam Anderson, in New York Magazine, notes that the book “carries an unusually heavy revisionist payload” and finds “the strength of Human Smoke comes from the defamiliarizing charge it brings to a familiar subject.” He ends by calling it “deeply convincing, and a much stronger message of peace than mere argument could ever muster.”

In the often hawkish political mag Commentary, David Pryce-Jones says that “Baker is one of those writers whose stock in trade is to shock, and that is what he has set out to do here.” He ends by asserting that “[t]he place of Churchill and Roosevelt in history is secure. The same will never be said about this mendacious book or its author.”

Adam Kirsch’s review in the New York Sun doesn’t pull any punches, even as it shift focus away from the book: “Even a book as bad as Human Smoke, Nicholson Baker’s perverse tract about the origins of World War II, helps to confirm the continuing centrality of that war in our moral lives.”

Here’s PW’s review:
“Burning a village properly takes a long time,” wrote a British commander in Iraq in 1920. In this sometimes astonishing yet perplexing account of the destructive futility of war, NBCC award-winning writer Baker (Double Fold) traces a direct line from there to WWII, when Flying Fortresses and incendiary bombs made it possible to burn a city in almost no time at all. Central to Baker’s episodic narrative- a chronological juxtaposition of discrete moments from 1892 to December 31, 1941-are accounts from contemporary reports of Britain’s terror campaign of repeatedly bombing German cities even before the London blitz. The large chorus of voices echoing here range from pacifists like Quaker Clarence Pickett to the seemingly cynical warmongering of Churchill and FDR; the rueful resignation of German-Jewish diarist Viktor Klemperer to Clementine Churchill’s hate-filled reference to “yellow Japanese lice.” Baker offers no judgment, but he also fails to offer context: was Hitler’s purported plan to send the Jews to Madagascar serious, or, as one leading historian has called it, a fiction? Baker gives no clue. Yet many incidents carry an emotional wallop-of anger and shock at actions on all sides-that could force one to reconsider means and ends even in a “good” war and to view the word “terror” in a very discomfiting context.

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